


Third Time's The Charm

by Glinda



Category: Doctor Who
Genre: Character Study, F/M, tindogs
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-09-06
Updated: 2008-09-06
Packaged: 2017-10-07 05:33:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,331
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/61904
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Glinda/pseuds/Glinda
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This is not the story of how they met. How Pete and Jackie Tyler found each other, three times over.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Third Time's The Charm

**Author's Note:**

> Written for memorae during the tindogs ficathon, beta-d by such heights.
> 
>  
> 
> Warnings for miscarriage and canon character death.

_This is not the girl he's going to marry._

The week before Pete Tyler's seventeenth birthday, he met the girl of his dreams. His latest scheme had gone a bit tits up, and there she was like something out of an old movie, legs that went on forever and a keen eye for a good business deal. She was older than him, but she told him she saw potential in him. With her looks and business sense and his ideas and charm, how could they fail? He never stood a chance.

Four and a half years later he sits staring at the ring he bought for her and wonders how he got there. She's out there making the rounds of the party, networking, leaving him to hold the ring that gets in the way of cutting those deals. His very own femme fatale. Too busy planning her next move, her next gain, to notice that their fledgling business is failing. He's never doubted (never will really) that he'll make it someday. Nor does he doubt that she will too: she's ruthless, he knows all too well. But them, they're not going to make it. He's still just a useful tool in her plans and schemes and, for all his wheeling and dealing, screwing people over has never sat right with him. Least of all when that person is him. He watches his fiancée-cum-business partner, fluttering round investors and competitors; charming and flirting something they're both good at. He always tries not to take his work home with him, whereas she seems to revel in taking it home. Or more accurately going home with the work. He doesn't mind, not really - it's her life her choice, but he's worked too hard to end up stuck in a marriage of convenience. She always comes back to him, but he's not a wide-eyed teenager anymore, he knows when something better comes along she'll be gone with hardly a backward glance. Once upon a time he would have done the same, but now he wants something more. He tells her he wants something of his own, and they both pretend he's only talking about business. A couple of months later she'll have a new business partner and a new diamond on her hand. He's quite sure there's no diamond big enough to hold her still, so he'll wish her luck and be surprised by how unbroken his heart feels now.

When Pete is twenty-three he meets a pretty girl in the pub and convinces her to go out on a date the following evening. He thought he was looking for a girl he could wind round his little finger, who'd fall for his charms and his patter, instead he got Jackie Prentice, with a soft heart and a healthy pair of lungs, who didn't stand for his nonsense and was probably the best thing that ever happened to him.

They fight long and hard about the stupidest of things. She's practical and down to earth, wants him to get a proper job so they can have a nice house, but she puts up with his schemes and dreams because, well, despite her better judgement he knows that she dreams of something beyond the estate she grew up on. She's come to expect her life to be average and normal, but secretly he knows she wants something more. He cheats on her once - nothing much, just one kiss, instantly regretted, but she finds out and decks him in the middle of the pub. Between the rage and the insults, she tells him he doesn't get rid of her that easily, and sitting on the floor of the Lamb and Flag, regulars jeering and laughing he understands that this thing they have is worth fighting for. He's angry and embarrassed and sore and elated, because he understands now that she loves him too.

He leans over the cot, and whispers his plans to their tiny daughter. Telling her to wait and see, not to believe her mummy, that he'll make them proud of him one day. He'll show them what he can do. He feels warm arms come round him, her chin on his shoulder so he can't see that her mascara's run from their latest fight. She whispers to prove her wrong and he promises he will. She doesn't believe him, but she wants to and that'll do for a start.

He dies before he gets the chance, but he gets a moment stolen out of time to see how his little girl turned out (someone else holds her hand as she lives her dreams but he's okay with that you have to let them go eventually) and to know that underneath it all Jackie had learned to believe in his dreams too.

 

_This is not the mother of his children._

She's lying there, on the slab, like some dead extra in an old B-movie, metal shell hiding the woman she used to be. Upgraded, he thinks, the bile rising in his throat; degraded more like. The sounds of so many souls trapped and unable to cope with the things they have become echoing in his head. He'd like to think that what made her, her was gone long before, but he knows she died screaming and he couldn't save her. Everything he worked for, fought for, all that power and influence and he couldn't protect her.

He thinks of her lying so pale and still, drained after the operation. Sitting beside her bed, holding her hand while she talks in that brittle broken voice that he'll always hate. The doctors have told them both that trying again isn't an option. He thinks of her lying too still, equipment beeping frantically, blood everywhere as doctors and nurses rush around her, fighting to keep her alive. A tiny little body, too small too still, a life never lived, lying just off to the side. Knowing the grief will come soon, but for now being too full of relief that she's not followed their child back into the darkness. She rules him in most things, but for once he puts his foot down, squashing her hope and hating himself for it. He wants children too but not at the expense of her life, losing her is not a trade-off he is willing to make. He searches for the words to explain, to remove the hurt from her eyes. They never do have children, her unwilling to adopt, him unwilling to risk losing her. They get through it, move on with their lives, but it festers, the one thing they never talk about, never fight about, till eventually they begin to drift apart. Both unwilling and unable to open the old wound even to save their marriage.

He never managed to find the words to explain it to her. He knows she always held it against him. The words come now, as he remembers the feel of a young woman who wasn't his daughter holding his hand. The experience and the knowledge giving shape to the fears and suspicions he's always had about himself. He tells her that he's not as strong as she is, he couldn't have raised their child alone. He's not sure right now that he knows how to carry on with his own life without her.

That he finds a way sometimes makes him feel even worse.

 

_This is not how it ends_

He's never been good with dates. Actually if he's honest he's utterly useless with dates, beyond the normal bloke blind spot for anniversaries and birthdays. After all his efforts to save this world he finds it particularly cruel of the universe that now that she's gone every last date is etched on his memory. The date they met, had their first fight, realised he loved her, got engaged, got married, lost their first baby, lost the last, got their dog, made their first million, the day she died. So standing in the graveyard on a cold autumn morning he's quite sure that today isn't the anniversary of anything significant in this universe. Yet there Mickey sits, talking quietly to the gravestone as though it's the most natural thing in the world. He wonders what the other universe's version of his wife was like, the woman who had leant on this boy in times of need.

He discovers this is the day he died. It wasn't him, anymore than the woman Mickey knew was his wife, or that young Rose with her big heart, her bravery and her hand that fit so well in his, is his daughter. Trying to define those lines of difference is far more complex than it should be, he thinks, spotting Jake's quiet presence waiting a safe distance away, but perhaps that pair have gone through the complexity and out the other side. He watches them walk away, silent conversation of shrugs, raised eyebrows and companionable bumping of shoulders. There's a horrible feeling in his chest watching them disappear, he's not sure if its pity or envy but he squashes it regardless.

 

_This is not how he met his wife._

He thinks he can do this. Can give them both a little comfort, a stolen moment, so they can both let go and move on. It's been three years for him and eighteen for her surely this should be their chance to let each other go. He tries to keep his distance, draw some lines of difference for both their sakes, so he uses his grief like a shield and catalogues the differences a different life has wrought upon them both. Her edges rubbed raw and rough by loneliness and a far from easy life, he can't help compare with his Jackie, rough edges rubbed smooth and cold from privilege and unspoken grief. She is so familiar yet so different, it's almost painful. They cling to each other desperately and he tells himself he can let go anytime. He isn't that man she married; she isn't the woman he married. That its only grief or loneliness or the shock of the familiar that makes her feel so right in his arms. He buries his face in her hair and hides from the truth. He thinks he might love her anyway.

He has a crisis a couple of months into this new life of theirs. Everything seems to have slotted into to place too easily. He's not used to this, everything good in his life has been hard work, perseverance, a little luck and a lot of charm. He takes to spending too much time at work again, no longer hiding from the silence in his house, but from the noise. He's missed Jackie terribly these last few years, but she never was easy to live with. He's forgotten how very vocal she can be, after the sullen, angry silences that marked the last few years of his marriage to his Jackie. He wonders if he'll ever be able to stop making the distinction.

He's working late one evening, convinced he has the building to himself when Jake appears. Just back from an assignment and dropping off a report, ostensibly dropping off a report Pete thinks, he can feel the tension borne of intent round the younger man as he leans against the wall. Jake tells him a long rambling story about him and Mickey meeting up with some old friends of his and Rickey's, from school or whatever. There are tangents and a strange tale about food poisoning in Paris that Jake concocted to cover for Mickey hating some foodstuff that Rickey had infamously loved. Pete restrains himself from interrupting to demand to know what the point is, because, aside from the odd clever quip, Jake never speaks without a point. Point is, he discovers that though Mickey isn't the person Jake grew up with, shared so much with, is different in a thousand subtle ways from Rickey, ultimately he's still Jake's best friend. He doesn't say anything else, getting up and wandering off to return to work, but Pete gets it. This Jackie may not be the woman he married, shared twenty years of his life with and watched drift away to where he couldn't reach her, but somehow she's still the woman he loves, and maybe that's more important than semantics.

To the rest of this world they're already married, this quiet ceremony a reconfirmation of vows in the wake of her miraculous recovery from a three-year long 'coma'. He's famous enough that its gossip magazine fodder, and his new more down-to-earth Jackie is caught between vanity, excitement and disgust at her own fame. It's hard, she complains half-heartedly, to savour the experience when her nineteen-year-old daughter is sniggering quietly (or occasionally snorting loudly) in the background. Rose just makes obscure comments about Henricks and airs and graces that make her mother huff and behave. He learns to get used to being referred to as Dad by worrying about his little girl's difficulties in settling in. Its not a fairytale mind you, they always did drive each other mad, there are fights and fallouts, arguments and antagonism. There's a lot of Rose standing between them shouting abuse about their stupidity as they sit and sulk in silence. It's hard and it hurts but they keep trying because they've lost each other once before and they both know the alternative is worse. So they stand in front of a minister with a few close friends and family and repeat the vows they both said to different people twenty odd years before. He gets her name right this time, she calls him a sentimental fool and Rose, Mickey and Jake attack them with cans of silly string. Watching Jackie caught between laughter and the desire to give them a clip round the ears, he thinks he might have somehow inherited three kids out of this. As second chances go, he's pretty sure he's struck gold with this one.


End file.
